


fun & games

by Welcoming_Disaster



Category: Marvel, Marvel Ultimates
Genre: Angst, Background canon Steve/Jan and Tony/Nat, Blow Jobs, Canonical Levels of Dickishness, Eventual Mostly Happy Ending, Internalized Homophobia, Light Bondage, M/M, Mentions of Canonical Child Death, Pining, References to Terminal Illness, Repression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:14:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29210940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Welcoming_Disaster/pseuds/Welcoming_Disaster
Summary: In which Steve Rogers keeps making bets he's going to lose.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 32
Kudos: 86





	1. 1

_Sixty Minutes_. Tony’s bored with the interview in the first ten of them. The noises of the party around them are so familiar he can close his eyes and trace each one of them. There’s clinking of forks, of glasses, from the last of the diners. There’s the laugher, the voices. His memory is near perfect, and if he focuses, he can recognize more than half of the people speaking, pick out the faint accents of scientists, the practiced cadences of politicians and reporters. Almost no one laughs in earnest, and Tony tells the fakes apart easily, the high trill of women pretending to be interested intermingled with the huffy, low thing men do when they think they’re funny. He’d been on the receiving end of a trill himself moments ago. The pretty blond reporter is wearing thinner on him by the minute.

He’s certainly not going to do sixty of them.

“Are you alright, Mr. Stark?” The reporter asks. Ah, yes. He’s closed his eyes in the middle of the interview.

“Just a headache, darling,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose. It’s not a lie. He doesn’t remember the last time he’d woken up without one. The faint buzz of alcohol — champagne, which never hits him the way he wants it to hit— is doing nothing for it.

When he opens his eyes, everything feels momentarily too bright, and he’s dizzy. He longs, suddenly, to trade this crowd for the comfort of his memory foam mattress and blackout curtains, the cool crispness of his sheets.

The grass is always greener on the other side; if he were home, he knows, he’d be depressed. The coolness of his bedroom wears on him just as much as the bright lights and the cameras. So little time left on earth, he reflects, and he can find nothing he’d like to do with it.

“Are you alright to continue?” He ought to know the reporter’s name. He doesn’t. He’d been thinking about sleeping with her, but suddenly, he’s just bored of the idea as the rest of the interview.

“No, I’m afraid,” he lets a note of playfulness into his voice, the kind of note that suggests he’s not showing weakness right now, “terribly, terribly afflicted. I’d best go get a drink of water.”

He leaves her sitting in one of the plush, comfortable chairs scattered around the ballroom and crosses the room. Jarvis, already at his side and grumbling about something or other, pours him a gin and tonic.

He’s antsy. Banner makes eye contact with him, surprised to see him back so soon, and Tony shrugs and leers at him, the sort of leer that suggests he’d done the reporter in the coat closet. The scientist interests him not at all.He thinks about making conversation with the Pyms and immediately discards the thought; married couples younger than him have the tendency to make him feel depressed when he’s like this.

Before the tumor, Tony prided himself on being something of a collector. As the pleasure of owning rare and expensive things wore thin, he branched had branched out from art to sculpture to trading card, and, somewhere along the way, tried his hand at keeping exotic fish. He found aquarium maintenance tricker than he’d expected, and the beautiful fish capricious and prone to random disease.

These days, oversensitive and picky, he feels more and more like some kind of exotic fish. No parameters are right; he thrives neither in light nor in darkness. Loneliness doesn’t suit him, and yet every tank-mate manages to rub him the wrong way.

His mood firmly glum now, Tony sips his gin and tonic and entertains himself by expanding the metaphor. Jarvis is some kind of aquatic snail, ever present in the background of his life steadily cleaning up small messes as algae blooms in the background, bright and toxic. The gaggle of reporters remind him of schooling fish, tiny but oddly menacing in large numbers. And the man they’re talking to —

Tony glances Rogers’s blue-clad back up and down, thoughtful, remembers the way he’d broken out of the medical facilities only a week earlier. The Cap suit,tight fitting, thick fabric, clings his chest, his sides, his thick, muscular neck. Steve Rogers is a killer whale among exotic fish, dressed up and performing but no less deadly for it.

Years ago, Tony had gone swimming with orcas in the icy waters off the coast of Norway. He’d chosen whales because sharks were too normal, too predictable, too easy. Half his friends had swam with a great white. He’d been struck by the ocean as much as the whales themselves, the cruel bite of cold even through his thermal wetsuit, the jerky, unpredictable shadows moving under the ice.

Now, watching Rogers mingle with the party guests, he wonders if he’s the only one who can feel the aura of danger coming off the man, the potential energy. You can pull a living thing out of the frozen ocean, shove it under bright lights and the eyes of a cheering crowd, but can you ever wring the last cold droplets out of the fiber of its being?

Rogers is out of his territory and it’s awfully clear. He’s not stupid; he smiles where he should smile, nods where he should nod, shakes hands and gives answers that’ll generate mostly positive press, but Tony sees the lines of tension in his back, the way his eyes keep returning to every exit of the room. He’d been in the war only weeks ago, as far as his memory can tell him.

It’s almost cute to watch him try, the same way as it’s cute to see a lion with a tutu around its neck. He’s out of his depth talking modern politics — Tony’s sure that SHIELD must have tried to catch him up on modern events, but without the context of having lived them, his words ring hollow. Even the decision to put him the new Cap suit, with everyone else in their evening best, draws a line of separation between him and the crowd.

Tony wonders if he’s self conscious. He’s young, underneath it all. He could be the youngest person in attendance; he’s at least a decade younger than most of the crowd. Tony himself, boy genius Tony, PhD-before-eighteen Tony, too young for the tumor in his brain Tony, has five years on this man.

Of course, he’d met vets like that before, kids who’d joined the army at eighteen and come home having lived too much for twenty-three, but he can’t make the mold fit around Captain America, who seems to radiate self-confidence and experience, whose image and name had been used to convey strength and power for decades. It’d be like feeling older than George Washington or Abe Lincoln.

It’s almost cute to watch the guy fumble at the finger food tray, cute in the same way that a lion is cute when you slap a tutu around its neck. He won’t take his gloves off, but he’s clearly uncertain about crumbs and food juice on the brand new, shiny red leather, property of SHIELD. Tony watches him reach for the skewered shrimp and immediately pull his hand back, and realizes he’d never had a choice to begin with.

He picks a shrimp up on his way to over to Rogers, rolling the skewer between thumb and index finger. Cap doesn’t need to be told to pay attention; his eyes are immediately on Tony, assessing. Sauce dribbles down the shrimp’s segmented, insectoid body, pools around the edges of Tony’s fingernail.

He’s civilized. He’s not going to lick that off. From the way that Cap’s dark blue eyes catch on his hand, Tony is near-sure the thought has occurred to both of them at once.

“Enjoying yourself, Captain?” He asks, leaning back against the table on his elbows.

“Sure,” Cap says, gruffly, “this is all very—“ it were up to him, Tony thinks, he’d stop talking here; this is all very, “— nice.”

“Isn’t it just.” Tony agrees, drying his hand off with a napkin. “Quite the spread here. Didn’t cheap out on the catering.”

Rogers hasn’t eaten. Tony is half expecting a loud, cartoon-like stomach rumble, but he’s disappointed; Cap just shrugs, his face a little pinched.

“Don’t know if I’m over or under-dressed,” he admits, gesturing over his tactical suit, startlingly white on crimson red, stars and stripes and heavy-spun, thick spandex. He’s holding the shield in a way that suggests he’s not quite sure what to do with it.

Tony makes a point of leering, the kind of joke leer men give people they can’t possibly find attractive. He lets his eyes linger on every place the suit fits too tightly; the biceps, the neck, each perfectly outlined ab. The pants are a little baggier, but Tony has a vivid imagination and Captain America probably has a big dick.

“I think you’re exactly as dressed as they want you to be,” he counters, waggling his eyebrows, “don’t think you’ve missed the angles of some of those cameras.”

Rogers flushes slightly. He’s reactive, Tony has noticed, unable to control the way he breathes, the color in his face, the sharp movements of his eyes. Again, Tony remembers the war he’d lived, wonders what it must be like to go from a world of irreverent, battle-forged camaraderie to one where people worry about his micro expressions. How many people in this room could eat him alive?

“Jesus,” he says, “I don’t know why that’s…”

He trails off, unable to come up with the words to describe what had just happened. Baby’s first time being sexually objectified by the masses generally and Tony Stark specifically. Something something gender equality.

“Forgive me, Cap,” he says, throwing him a casual, self-deprecating grin. People have been clamoring to talk to him all night, so, naturally, Tony wants to hold up the person anxious to get away from him. “Thinking like a reporter. I’ve been considering branching out.”

Cap lifts his eyebrows, nonplussed.

“Seems like you’ve got a lot on your plate already, Stark.” He says. His tone is gruff, no nonsense, military. Last name, no “Mr.” or “Dr.” in front of it. In this world, something about this feels honest to the point of naïveté. Tony wants to reach over and pinch his cheek, just to see what would happen. “With the— whatever it is you do.”

Tony laughs. “There’s space for a mass media conglomerate,” he tells Rogers, “one adapted for the digital age. If we’re not talking about media and web monopolies in, say, ten years or so, I’ll eat my hat.”

“What, now,” Rogers say, surprising Tony, “are we betting?”

“Sure thing, darling,” says Tony, who won’t be alive to win this bet, “you can owe me one.”

Rogers bristles just slightly, and Tony can’t tell if it’s in response to the suggestion or the pet name. It’s best to offer the dog a bone.

“Let me see your gloves,” he says, “hidden feature.”

Rogers offer his hand over slowly, like he’s expecting some kind of trick. Tony smirks and digs his fingers into the thick seams around the fingers, looking for zippers.

“The fingers come off,” he says, demonstrating as he explains it, “tiny, tactical zippers. More practical for those of us eyeing the shrimp.”

He expects Rogers to draw his hand back and do the rest himself, but instead the soldier just stands there, letting Tony pull his hands around and fuss with the seams, pulling pockets of red leather from each fingertip. He’s probably right handed — he seems like he would be. This probably easier for him.

Once he’s done with the right hand, Rogers offers him his left. He can’t know how this looks, Tony thinks, digging his fingers into the seams of the second glove to free the zippers. He’s the kind of guy who’d freak out about something like that.

Without asking, Tony reaches over and unzips the biggest pocket of his cargo pants, shoving the glove parts inside. “Careful with the sauce, now,” he says, like Rogers is a child, and doesn’t stick around to watch his reaction.

He takes someone home after the party, a brown-eyed brunette who isn’t quite his type but seems like she’d be sweet when he won’t be able to get it up. Later, in bed, her hands in his hair and his mouth on her nipple, he thinks about how he’d enjoy fucking Rogers.

It’s not about the body; Tony, generally speaking, plays the other side of the field. There have been exceptions, of course — Tony isn’t planning to go out without having tried it all, thank you very much — but, despite what Jarvis says, he’s perfectly secure with himself as a straight man.

Like all of the gay porn he watches, it’s about the vulnerability of the act, the idea of being allowed to do something no one else could. He’d always been the kind of child to run through untouched snow, and so it follows, perfectly naturally, that he wants to take Rogers’s macho straight guy, perfect soldier schtick and ruin it.

The idea of Captain America on his knees with Tony’s dick in his mouth is hot enough by itself that, by the end of the night, Tony’s boner pulls a miraculous return to form even despite the latest round of chemo. His one night stand doesn’t stick around, for which he’s privately grateful, and once he’s called her a cab he pulls himself out of bed and scavenges around for onboarding folder SHIELD had given him.

At first, he thinks he’d lost or trashed it, but, finally, he digs it out from the bottom of one of the many random drawers in his desk, flips it open.

And, as he’s expected, a little American flag lays folded inside, one inch by three inches of rough, cheap-o fabric on what might as well be a popsicle stick. He pulls it out, free of the folder, and sticks it into the cup on his nightstand.

He’s feeling awfully patriotic.

* * *

For a while, things are quiet and entirely supervillain free. Iron Man saves a few kittens here and there — gotta love the guy — and Tony checks in semi-regularly for training exercises with the Ultimates, but, for the most part, he continues to play out overfamiliar scenes on the grand stage of his life, feeling more like an actor than an active participant.

He sits in board meetings, dully paying attention to words he could recite in his sleep. He’s on TV, smiling for the cameras, cracking just-clean-enough-to-air jokes, saying things just controversial enough to be interesting. He goes to space, stares at the earth impossibly small behind the glass window, and feels nothing.

Sometimes, tinkering with the suit in the lab, he thinks like he’s seeing only one tiny part of a grand picture, a grand design. If he had the time to keep chipping away at it, years upon decades of time, perhaps he’d one day come to understand something.

On the Ultimates, he strikes up lazy conversation with the Pyms, both of whom he finds interesting to bounce off in training exercises but mostly boring in life. Nick Fury is funny when he wants to be and a pain in the ass as necessary, a quality Tony can respect without liking.

Rogers, who Tony has expected would embody the gruffness he radiates, is strangely quiet. He’ll crack a joke if he can fit one into the conversation, but, considering half the team’s verbal shorthand seems to come from pop culture references, he’s out of the loop as often as he’s in it. He brings books with him to the recreation room, big hands comically careful with the pages. It’s been two weeks and he’s still working through _Cat’s Cradle._ Tony, who watches him more than he would admit, has seen him read the same paragraph over and over again for minutes, his expression vacant.

He doesn’t make a big deal of it. Tony Stark is nothing if not effortless charm — the disinterested air of a playboy comes to him as easily as breathing. He waits for Rogers to talk to him first, and waits, and waits, and waits.

The guy’s depressed, out of his element. That much is clear. Out of everyone, he talks most to Jan, whose husband always cuts the conversation off within two minutes of it starting. And that’s fine. Jan is pretty, approachable, doesn’t make random comments about Cap’s backside. She spends far more time with Rogers than Tony ever does, attends every team meeting, hangs out around the compound. She doesn’t have another job. She’s also a woman. Tony, whose interest in Cap is entirely platonic, should not feel jealous.

They settle into a relatively stable dynamic. Both of them talk to the team, Tony significantly more than Cap. Neither of them talk to each other, outside of tactical exercises.

Still, as with all things, there comes a point when Tony can’t take it anymore.

One day, after training, as the team is headed for the rec room, Tony tags along. He generally doesn’t; the pizza provided after these occasions tends to leave him feeling nauseated and bloated, and he’s always got four other things on his plate.

He still passes on the offer of pizza, leaning against the rec room refrigerator. Oddly enough, it’s Fury who glances over at him, assessing. Tony wonders he’s worried about being poisoned; he certainly comes off as paranoid enough.

Cap, as always, sits alone at the table adjacent to the booth where the Pyms sit, his book in front of him. It’s still fucking Vonnegut.

Tony sees the spy’s jaw relax marginally as he heads towards Rogers, like he’s figured something out, and he already knows he’ll hate whatever conclusion the man has come to.

Now isn’t the time, though. Tony sits down on the corner of the plastic table and pulls the book out of Cap’s hands, flipping through the pages.

“Now you’ve gone and lost my spot,” Rogers says, sounding mildly bummed out.

“Where were you at?” Tony asks, skimming a passage at random. He remembers nothing of the book except for a description of ants using the friction of their bodies to make water.

Rogers blinks the question has caught him off guard. “He’s gotten to San Lorenzo,” he says, as though remembering events as he’s saying them, “the dictator is dying. He’s in love with his daughter.”

Privately, Tony thinks that ‘in love’ is a fairly charitable interpretation of writing.He doesn’t voice the thought, just flips to the last page and skims through the ending, tuts.

“Oh,” he says, considering the description of the dead, frozen man in a dead, frozen world, thumbing his nose at the Heavens, “you’ll hate this one, Cap.”

“Why’s that?”

Rogers makes a grab for the book, but Tony steps back, holding it out of reach. “I don’t even know who’d let you read this.”

“No one _lets_ me read anything.”

Tony stares him down, one eyebrow raised. Cap glances back at where Fury had been sitting just a few minutes earlier. “Nick said it was good.”

“‘ _Nick_ ’ has one hell of a sense of humor, darling.”

Rogers scowls at him. “I like it better than all those flicks. It’s modern. I can handle that.”

“Postmodern,” Tony corrects automatically, earning himself a deeper scowl, “but, no, it’s not that.”

“Well, give it back and let me see for myself, then.”

“Sure,” Tony says, “bet.”

“That I won’t like it?” Rogers wipes pizza grease off his fingers and stands, eyeing the book. Tony wonders if he’s thinking of a tussle. He’s not a fan of that thought, because he doesn’t see himself coming out on top. “I could just lie.”

“Captain America’s gonna lie to me, now?”

“I was a spy,” Rogers says, but something inside him seems to compel him to add, “well, kind of,” which makes Tony’s point better than Tony ever could.

“I think,” Tony gestures with the book as he speaks, “that you’ll hate it enough you won’t want to lie to me about it.”

“Big words,” Cap says, “what are we betting on?”

“You can owe me one,” Tony shrugs, smug.

“Seems like that’s your default.”

Tony struggles to remember the last time they’d bet. Oh, yes— the party. The one Tony won’t cash.

“Well, what do you have that I want?” He asks, practically. “I’m the man who has everything, darling, favors are the way of the world.”

“Alright,” Rogers says, “when I like this, I’ll take a book from you.”

“A book?”

“I’m sure you’ve got plenty. I’ll pick it, of course, since you clearly don’t know my taste.”

Tony laughs, charmed. “Bet, then.”

He holds out _Cat’s Cradle._ When Rogers takes it from him, their fingers brush.

“I’d say have fun, but that’d be against my own interests, wouldn’t it?” As Cap sits back down, Tony lets his hand fall casually onto his shoulder, squeezing the place where his neck begins. The curve of muscle is solid, perfect, and Tony thinks he could close his eyes and be able to identify each muscle in Cap’s body by touch alone. Here’s the trapezius, and there, under and over, the deltoid, and there—

He can’t keep touching too long. He knows this.

Cap’s not stopping him, though. He wonders exactly what he could get away with, what Cap would let him do.

Reasonably, this is the time to back off. Tony’s personal fantasies aside, there’s no need to make the guy uncomfortable, especially when they’d been getting along just fine moments earlier.

Cap’s not stopping him, though. Drunk on the power of that, Tony lets his hand drift up and messes up his perfectly combed hair.

The spell is broken. Cap startles, glances up at him. Tony grins in response and pushes away from the table. “Well, ta-ta. Duty calls.”

He can feel Cap’s eyes on his back as he leaves the room. Privately, though, his mind elsewhere; he’s imagining everything he could do with Cap’s time, if he wins the bet.

* * *

Two days later, the Bruce Banner injects himself with the serum and the Hulk tears apart Manhattan. For as long as Tony had known a day like this was coming, that, eventually, the Ultimates would be deployed against real threats, he doesn’t know that he can do it before he does it. Days after the attack, he can still feel the places where the Hulk’s fingers had dug into the sides of his head.

Part of him almost misses the fight. In the heat of the moment, he had found no time for the idle suicidal ideation, for the slow counting of days. He had felt alive, and he’d wanted, desperately, to stay that way.

He’d liked Thor, too. It seems as though, lately, he’s kept up a nice track record of being pleasantly surprised by tall, blond, buff men.

He invites the team over for dinner before they’ve even finished counting all the bodies. He’s desperate to keep the Ultimates around, he realizes, desperate to stay on. He sees a future in them he can’t find in himself.

Thor looks strangely domesticated in the beige sweater and green slacks he wears, remarkable only for his height and literally godlike physique. Cap wears his dress uniform. He makes a perfect picture in layers of khaki, old fashioned in a charming way. Tony feels the urge to mess him up, pull his tie out over his coat, ruin his slicked-back hair.

Only two days ago, the Hulk had broken his nose, cracked his ribs, pulled his left arm out of its socket. Tony can barely tell; all that remains of remains of the fight are several small, yellow green bruises on his face and his slightly over-careful posture.

“You know,” he says, as Cap pulls off his coat and Thor steps forward to look around the roomy hallway, “I really can’t tell you how fabulous it is to see you boys again. That fight with the Hulk was one of the most exhilarating experiences in my life.”

He’s not lying. Rogers lifts an eyebrow at him, a multitude of judgements packed into one expression. Tony could peel them away, layer by layer — _a rookie, for all that big talk, eccentric,_ and underneath, perhaps, _hardy exhilarating, considering lives lost,_ and then, underneath all of that, _hadn’t it been our fault?_

Tony doesn’t want to think about that. He rattles on steadfastly, pushing the conversation in waters that could easily be fun for all of them. Rogers pushes him on it, (“What would people do,” he keeps asking, “if they knew? What would they think?”), but when it comes down to it, he’s a good soldier. He’d make an awful whistle blower, and Tony feels a strange security around that fact. A little loyalty has never hurt anyone.

He leads the two men back to the dining room, past all the hallways where Tony has been boxing up his accumulated junk. It’s humbling, to see his everything he’d impulse bought in his twenties laid out in neat boxes in front of him, as meaningless and disconnected from him as it had been when he’d purchased it.

He wonders if Thor owns anything at all. He seems like the kind of man to live off almost nothing, buy almost nothing. Perhaps everything he has matters to him. He seems like the kind of man who has it all fucking figured out, doesn’t he?

One of the first thing Steve Rogers has done, in the 21st century, had been to assemble a record collection. Tony hasn’t been to his apartment, but he’s seen Rogers steadily collecting new jackets, new books, new shoes. He has a new keychain, a little white thing with with “I ❤ New York” printed on it, the kind of touristy crap he’ll cringe at when he’s more in the zeitgeist.

Just like Tony, he tries to fill himself with things, to shove objects in the glaring holes decades in the ice had torn in his life.

If Steve was a woman — if either one of them was a woman — Tony knows just what he’d do. _We’re a colossally bad idea, baby,_ he’d say. Perhaps even, _I could offer something else for you to shove into the hole where your soul ought to be, wouldn’t that be easy?_

It’s the kind of fake, condescending charm Tony is sure Rogers would hate.

He beckons them over to the table, where Jarvis pours all of them wine. He notices a slight hesitation before Rogers takes his, the uncertainty of a man who doesn’t want to be rude. He lets it go. The bigger matter at hand is goading Thor onto their official team roster.

“So,” he says, even though he already knows, “what’s with all this son of Odin stuff, anyways? Are you really the genuine article, or just a big, scary man with a hammer?”

He’s seen everything he can find about Thor, from his interview on _Sixty_ fuckin’ _Minutes_ to the rambly blog maintained by one of his most devoted followers. If nothing else, the guy is a true believer.

Still, it’s polite to ask, to hear the truth from the horse’s mouth.

“Oh, very much the genuine article, Tony.” Thor sounds pleased to have been asked, happy to explain, “I am God made man.”

Tony has to bite back the joke already on the tip of his tongue, _we’re all God-made men, if you believe in that sort of thing._

 _“_ The living incarnation of a Norse thunder deity sent here by my father in Valhalla to purify the earth again.”

“Don’t you think joining our team could provide a useful platform to get that message out there, Thor?” Tony asks.

As Jarvis serves coffee, they banter back and forth. Thor’s fun, easy — Tony gets the feeling he could get wound up but chooses not to.

Eventually, things get personal, as they always do. Thor switches tracks and focuses his attention on Tony.

“So what about you, Tony? Why did _you_ decide to get involved in all this madness?”

Tony glances between the two men, assessing. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t see the night’s conversation coming to this. He’d be lying he said he hadn’t set himself up, to some degree, for this line of questioning.

He realizes that he wants the team to see this part of him, wants them to know what he’d kept so close to his chest for months now. He hasn’t told his twin brother or any of the women he’s taken home, but these near-strangers are men he’ll perhaps one day die with.

He taps two fingers against his temple and explains the tumor.

Thor’s voice is gentle, like he expects it to be, a little mournful but understanding. Steve, on the other hand, is harder to pin down. His mouth screws up, the scowl almost disapproving, like he’s about to tell Tony’s cancer cells to man up and do better. “Is this a joke? One of those ironic things I never seem to get?”

Tony sighs and forks over the medical information expected of him, running through the motions — he doesn’t know how long he has left, exactly, but the specialists place him at six months to five years. It’s inoperable.

And then, before either of the other men can think to break the awkward, near embarrassing silence with anything like pity, Tony changes the subject and delights in presenting Cap with present he’d picked out.

“Oh, it’s just one of those wacky old collectibles I’m getting rid of, Rogers,”He lies, as Jarvis holds the box out to Rogers, “I’m sure it’d look better in your humble home than it ever did here.”

It’s not wrapped, and slightly dusty, the same box it had been in when he’d bought it. Unreadable sharpie still clings on to the tape that had once been used to seal the box.

Cap reaches in and pulls the present out, holding it up to let its scratched surface catch the light. Tony watches his micro expressions; the surprise, the burst of nostalgia, just a little mournful. For a moment, he wonders if he’s miscalculated, and then Rogers grins.

“What do you think?” Tony asks, smiling back.

It’s the real deal, the same helmet he’d worn into war, scratched and weathered after years of service and decades of storage, the leather cracked and dried with age.

Tony tells him the story, the woman who’d claimed her father had brought it home from the war, the last remnant of the bravest man he’d ever known.

Rogers runs his fingers over the interior of the helmet, his expression distant. Tony wonders what he’s remembering.

“Oh my God,” he says, quietly, “I— I don’t know what to say.”

Tony glances up to meet his eye. He’s got pretty blue eyes, a deep, glasslike blue that seems a little out of place on him, a little too delicate.

“Well, just say you’ll join me in a toast, Steve.” Tony says, reveling in the first name terms he’s pulled them into, in the newfound ability to tell Steve what to do.

They drink. Though Thor and Steve stay another hour, sipping coffee and eating the figs Tony has gotten into the habit of getting imported, Hank and Jan never show.

He’s not too worried. Things come up, and neither of the scientists had ever shown much fondness for him anyhow. 

Tony leans against the wall in the hallway as his two guests go for their coats. Thor’s headed for the door first, and he lets him go, his eyes fixed on Cap.

“Well,” Steve starts, a little uncertainly, one arm in the sleeve of his heavy coat, “that was a nice night. Thank you for having us.”

Tony raises an eyebrow at him. This is how he likes to see himself; cool, collected, in control, forcing this situation into his own terms. He feels like a playboy. It’s the slightly aggressive, predator-and-prey style seduction of the schlocky 1980s action flicks he’d grown up watching, with himself as a Harrison Ford and Steve Rogers as Karen Allen.

Strictly in the platonic sense, of course.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” He asks.

Steve glances down at the cardboard box in his hands as though he could have somehow managed to forget it. “I didn’t take my boots off, did I?”

Tony laughs. “ _Cat’s Cradle_ , Captain?”

“Ah,” Steve says, his words measured, “yeah, I finished it last night.”

“And?” Tony steps forward. Steve can easily save his dignity; whatever else Tony can do, he certainly can’t read his mind. Part of it — of admitting his feelings about the ending, the awful, strange way he must have felt taking in those final paragraphs only weeks out of the ice himself — must be a kind of weakness. On top of that, he doubts Steve is the kind of man who likes owing people.

He expects Rogers to lie. _It was fine,_ he expects, or, _well, I didn’t get it._

Instead, though, Steve meets his eye. “I hated it,” he admits, “you were right.”

Tony grins, wide and excited, feeling like a kid at Christmas. Or— a kid just before Christmas, making a list of everything he’d like.

“I win, then,” he says, “a shame. I’d already picked out a book for you.”

“I’d have been picking,” Steve points out, a little childishly, “if I’d won.”

This, naturally, makes Tony grin even wider. “Well, sweet cheeks, I won, and you owe me one.”

“And what will that be, then?” Steve asks. He’s still half in his coat, half out of it.

“I’ll text you the time, place, and dress code.” Tony says, his smile audible in his voice. “Go on, then, shoo. Bye-bye.”

Steve pulls his coat all the way on but pauses, old fashioned politeness warring with curiosity, “Dress code? It’s not another fancy party, is it?”

“Wouldn’t be half as fun if you knew, would it?” Tony sets a hand on Rogers’s waist, giving him a light push towards the door. It’s all that’s needed; he goes without further protest.

So, alright, he reflects as he heads upstairs for bed, topping off his glass of wine on his way, he’s got an interest. Clearly, out of the team, he ought to be prefer Thor, who is easy going, with whom conversation comes easily, or perhaps the scientists, who, if he tried, he’s sure he could find a common language yet. He hasn’t tried.

And yet he’s gone out of his way to get the attention of Steve Rogers, a man with whom he has about as much in common as an African parrot with a can of sardines. He wants Steve’s attention. If he’s honest with himself, he wants Steve.

He reassesses the situation through the light of this revelation. He’d thought it had nothing to do with the body, but, perhaps—

Well, it’s only natural to be drawn to strength, to perfection. Cap is objectively gorgeous. Cap embodies the unrealistic standard of male beauty he’d grown up with, the perfect specimen. The skin-tight clothing had never helped, either; anyone, straight or otherwise, would look. Can he, a man who’d so often failed to measure up, a man whose own body is killing him, be blamed for his desire for this perfection?

He wants to push Rogers around. He wants control. That, too, is natural enough; he’s never gone for easy, and to bring someone like Rogers to his knees — anyone would want that. Anyone, straight or otherwise, would chase that power rush. It says nothing about him that he didn’t already know.

It’s goes further than that, though, and Tony is self aware enough to know that. Thor is just as muscular as Rogers, just as a blond, and perhaps only a little less pretty.

It’s Thor’s easy self-assuredness, as much as anything else, that makes him fundamentally less interesting to Tony. Rogers is a strange, intoxicating blend of strength and weakness, self-confidence and anxiety, awkwardness and charm. He’s both younger and older than Tony.

Isn’t it only normal that Tony keeps wanting to force him into terms he understands, into his own territory? Isn’t it normal that he sees the weakness and longs to dig his fingers into it, pull it apart, to take control? It’s only as sexual as he lets it be. It could be the start of a wonderful friendship with slightly uncomfortable deeply homoerotic undertones.

With this in mind, Tony calls his secretary and then his tailor. He needs a half-decent reason to drag Captain America along to one of his cocktail parties if he doesn’t want the paparazzi to sniff out how far into the gutter his brain has gone about the man.

* * *

The next time he sees Cap, it’s under far less pleasant circumstances. It turns out they ought to have been worrying about the Pyms; Hank, it turns out, has gotten into the habit of throwing his wife around, and, the night when Cap and Thor had been drinking wine at Tony’s, he’d gone too far. As Betty Ross fills them in on the situation and the history, her usual terseness mixing with a low, guilty note, Tony sees the set of Rogers’s jaw and knows he’s going to do something about it.

They don’t have time to talk anything, the next time they meet afterwards; they’re leaving to deal with extraterrestrials in Micronesia. Suited up from the start, Tony isn’t on the plane with the rest of the team, but he does tune into the radio comms, and here he hears a clipped, terse Cap, a Cap he’d only briefly glimpsed when they were up against the Hulk. 

This is America’s stalwart, no-nonsense action hero, projecting the kind of strength his troops can respect. Perhaps Tony is overestimating himself, but he thinks that, underneath it all, he senses the same bone-deep fear that himself is feeling, the same roiling anxiety. Cap’s been doing this far longer than he has.

He wonders, as they drift closer to their destination, which one of knows pain better. Tony has spent the past year in a constant haze of headaches and migraines, of body aches great and small, had thrown up so much post-chemo that the line from his throat down to his stomach had been one single trail of agony.

On the other hand, he has little experience with the cutting, crushing sort of pain of Rogers’s world. He’d come out of the battle with the Hulk barely bruised, protected by the armor, while Cap had gotten up and talked to the cameras through mouthfuls of blood and ribs that Tony had _heard_ snap. He goes into fights like this anticipating pain, knowing how small the chance of him getting out unwounded is, and Tony can’t fault the hard grip he has, now, on his machine gun.

The following day unfolds less like a fight and more like some kind of thriller. Tony can imagine the music going quiet when they find the island. The drop of the nuclear bomb, even from behind his forcefield, is near-cinematic.

First act. Inciting incident. More people dead than Tony can conceptualize.

The actual fight starts at the Triskelion.

Tony spends it in the air, providing support for Thor against enemy aircraft, stopping falling debris, trying to prevent civilians from being crushed by the horrible metal machines tumbling out of the sky.

When he falls, he falls hard, the world spinning around him. He chokes, motion sick for the first time in his life, and vomits all over the inside of his own helmet. He hasn’t eaten, so it’s liquid, bile and alcohol mixing, the smell of it enough to have him dry heaving again.

“I can’t do this,” he groans, “I can’t, I can’t—“

How could ever think that he could? How could he _dare_ put himself on the same stage as superhumans, as Gods? What the hell had he been playing at?

“If you don’t, who else will?” Asks the soldier already pulling the suit upright to recharge, and in the end, it’s that simple.

Later, when the fight is over, the bomb out of the way, he’s hanging back in the air, still ready to help any overturned trucks or crushed men. He doesn’t turn away when he sees Steve, his uniform badly torn, blood streaming out of his nose, duck behind one of the armored trucks to take his own turn throwing up his breakfast. There’s substantially more food in this one, coming out in a mostly-digested mush.

One of the soldiers breaks away from the group, following him, and, zooming in, Tony can see Steve’s abject dread at the prospect of returning to the group. He leans hard against the truck for a moment, and then straightens up, heads back into the crowd, and gives a speech.

Tony listens to it over the comms. To his tired, overwhelmed ears, it sounds pretty damn inspiring, hits all the right beats.

He lands by the team, listening to their idle chatter. He wants to pull the helmet off, but he doesn’t want them to smell the alcohol and bile, so he refrains.

Briefly, he imagines the cocktail party, the tailored suit, showing off Captain America to guests he certainly will never like, imagines seeing where that 20th century politeness really breaks, and realizes he’ll have to call off the arrangements. He’s not cashing it in then.

He follows the team back. His request has the highest chance of working if he asks in private, and, for the next several hours, Rogers is a hard man to get alone. He shakes hands with soldiers, nods gruffly at the other SHIELD breach teams, shouts things like, “saw you boys out there!” and “keep it up!” most of which, Tony is sure, he doesn’t really mean all that much.

Tony gives up on talking to him before then and goes to strip off the suit in the laboratories upstairs, taking the time to rinse off not only the flight gel but also the vomit. He’s sure he still must smell, but he’s also sure he won’t be the only one.

He pulls a robe on over his short undersuit, slippers over his bare feet, and, feeling comically out of place, rejoins the team downstairs. It seems strange to be a part of this group, mostly military or secret intelligence, people hardened by circumstance and force of will. Even now, Tony feels like an imposter, like a boy playing action figures, bashing his glorified transformer doll against Captain America and Thor.

He wonders how many people in the team feel the same, spies working with legends, scientists on the same team as gods, a soldier from a long-gone war fighting alongside a machine made to level tanks. Everyone but Thor is probably in a position to feel a little insecure about themselves, and Thor’s a talented guy. Tony’s sure he’ll manage to find something.

Thor leaves first, clapping each of his teammates on the shoulders in turn. Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch don’t bother saying goodbye — Tony wonders if they had, indeed, actually been in battle— and Hawkeye gives a distracted wave as he leaves, his phone at his ear.

“Lived to die another day, comrade?” Natasha asks him, specifically, her voice low, husky, and a little amused. “I’ll see you again.”

She leaves him, a little surprised by the connection, pleased, standing with Jan and Cap. He glances away, watching her go, as Jan gets onto her tiptoes and hugs Steve, small enough that the top of her head only barely brushes against his chin.

For a moment, he thinks, jealously, that she’s about to take him home with her, that he’s been hanging around for nothing, but she only squeezes his hand and says something about seeing the state her car is in, and then the two of them are left alone, standing the open plan semi-privacy of the Ultimates compound.

Tony thinks he could leave and Cap would just stay standing here, indefinitely, with that same aimlessly determined set of his shoulders, the same torn uniform, blood dripping from his nose onto the shiny tiled floor.

“C’mon,” he says, “you’re coming home with me.”

Steve blinks at him, clearly caught off guard, “I am?”

“You owe me one,” Tony reminds him, “and I don’t want to drink alone right now.”

Rogers stares him down, looking about to protest, but all he says is, “Let me get a change of clothes.”

In retrospect, this is where everything starts to veer off course.


	2. 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you're noticing the updated rating and sexy tags -- they're not for this chapter! but soon.

One you know him, Steve Rogers is a shitty liar. The Ultimates have known him for just over a year, now, and this is why he’s the only one of the four people playing to have lost more than his socks. His shirt lays neatly folded on Tony’s lush leather footstool, his belt over top of it. Janet, tucked into his side, her own cards balanced carefully on her knee, runs her hand over his bare abs, appreciative.

“Round of bad luck,” Steve says.

Natasha, who’s laying halfway across Tony, her shirt undone despite no losses calling for it, scoffs.

There are two couches in Tony’s comfortable sitting room, both a cheerful yellow that he’s sure he didn’t pick out. They’re both angled towards the television, creating a sort of semi-circle. They also do the job of breaking the four of them into self-contained pairs, Steve with Janet and Tony with Natasha. It’s comfortable, almost ordinary.

“Luck’s got nothing to do with it, old boy,” Tony says, “you’ve just got to believe your own bluff.”

He’s the pleasant kind of buzzed, which is rare these days, appreciative of the company and the warmth of Natasha’s skin on his. Thor’s the only person invited who hasn’t shown, and Tony isn’t surprised; as much as he loves the guy, he’s felt like the fifth wheel a lot, lately.

Steve ragequits soon afterwards, when another loss has Janet reaching for his fly. He’s by far the most expressive player, his poker face unpracticed, and this extends even post-game; his embarrassed flush reaches down to collarbones.

Unwilling to keep playing with only three, Tony lazily collects everyone’s cards and shuffles them.

“No fair,” Natasha drawls, “that barely went anywhere.”

“We can do something else,” Tony suggests.

Jan, tipsy in a giggly, hyperactive way, is playing keep-away with Steve’s shirt. “Never have I ever,” she suggests, her voice slightly winded, breathy, “strip never have I ever.”

“Drinking never have I ever,” Tony counters, because, despite all his big talk, he’d rather be drunk than naked.

“I’m drinking coke,” Steve says, puffing his chest out. He’s always a little louder, a little more assertive, when the girls are around.

“If you’re drinking coke,” Natasha says, not bothering to look up at him, “you’re stripping again.”

“Aw, c’mon,” Steve says, “your boyfriend’s probably sick of seeing all that.”

Tony’s gearing to reply, something along the lines of never preventing female fun if he can have it, but Natasha beats him to it.

“Oh, don’t stop on his account,” she says, “not unless you’re aiming for the most misplaced act of charity since—“

“Hey!” Tony says, a strange, defensive humiliation burning hot in his gut, “Thought you didn’t talk to Jarvis, where’re you—“

“That’s three votes for Steve stripping, right?” Janet chirps, disinterested in going down this particular conversational avenue, “I’m counting three votes for Steve stripping.”

“I’ll strip if you give me my shirt back,” Steve grumbles, making another swipe for it. “And my socks. And—“

Natasha picks up Tony’s hand, fiddling with the little ring around his pinkie finger, pulling it off to see how it fits her own, much smaller, hands. She’s bored, and a bored Natasha is a recipe for disaster.

“Let him get dressed,” Tony intervenes, swiping the belt out of Jan’s hands to toss to Steve, “let’s get this show on the road. Drinks, Jarvis?”

“Coke for me,” Steve calls, unnecessarily; the butler already knows, “no ice.”

Steve Rogers is a shitty liar, but no one, not even his girlfriend, watches him as closely as Tony does once they start playing. Three of them are drunk enough to almost immediately veer into the territory of uncomfortably sexual once they start playing.

“Never have I ever been photographed naked,” Jan says triumphantly, tripping up both Tony and Natasha.

“Babe,” Steve starts, aghast, but everyone ignores him.

“Never have I ever flashed half of SHIELD,” Natasha counters lazily, “dick slips count, Tony, drink up.”

Tony rolls his eyes. “Never have I ever given a blowjob.” It’s not meant as anything — he knows full well that this is the one game where Cap never loses, and is aiming to get the ladies out— but this is where he sees it. Two tiny spots of color appear on Steve’s cheeks, and he makes a tiny upward movement with his glass of coke, as though about to drink, before he refrains.

Tony makes eye contact with him, his heart suddenly pounding hard against his ribcage. No one else had seen.

It must be a mistake.

He must have misheard what Tony had said, mistook what the slang meant. He couldn’t have possibly— could he?

No, no. Not Captain America. Not Steve Rogers.

In the confines of this room, warm and hazy with drink, Tony feels slightly winded, unable to really wrap his head around the possibility. This isn’t how this works. As risqué as they’re getting, here, it stays within the safe confines of two heterosexual couples, the light hazing of playful heterosexual desire. When Natasha had even hinted at anything else, earlier, he’s immediately felt off balance, defensive.

He can’t let himself even think about this right now, not with her eyes on him.

Cap’s still holding his eyes. He’s sober. It couldn’t have been a drunken mistake. Tony can see the fear and humiliation badly obscured behind his shaky, too-neutral poker face.

“Your turn, Cap,” Tony reminds him.

“I know,” Steve says, another lie, clearly visible, “I’m just thinking of one.”

“Well, hurry up,” Natasha says, “we’re not expecting it to be good, anyhow.”

“I’ve never stood someone up,” Steve says, finally, his eyes on Tony’s bright purple carpet, “on a date, I mean.”

Natasha groans and drinks, as does Tony. Jan rolls her eyes, making a big point of drinking her drink with annoyance. Tony guesses the incident had been recent.

“Never have I ever said the wrong name in bed,” She says, keeping eye contact with Steve. She’s definitely drunk, her words slurring slightly, and though her voice is light enough, playful, Tony already knows Steve won’t take this well.

And there it comes again, the little flush, the momentary embarrassment, the upward gesture of the glass towards his lips.

“Jan, baby—“ Steve starts, discomfort climbing quickly into a more pronounced, angry sort of upset, but Jan hears none of it.

“No, you’re stripping, remember?” She asks, grabbing him by the arm, “Shirt off, shirt off.”

“Don’t be a spoilsport, Rogers.” Natasha says, her annoyance showing. She holds her liquor remarkably well; Tony wouldn’t be able to tell, if he didn’t know, that she’d been drinking at all. “We already stopped poker for you.”

“I hate this game,” Steve announces, stripping his shirt back off. The tension between them, Tony thinks, is genuine. Trouble in paradise. “Jan, we’re gonna have to go soon. I want an early start—“

“Never have I ever cheated on a boyfriend,” Natasha announces loudly, drowning both of them out. She’s the best liar of them all; Tony, who’s been sleeping with her for almost a year, can’t tell if she’s being honest or not. It rankles.

No one drinks.

“Or girlfriend,” Natasha adds, prompting Tony to throw back a shot, “or husband, Janet, c’mon.”

“It doesn’t count!” Steve says, immediately ready to defend the girlfriend he’d been so upset with moments ago, “He was—“

“Nooope, no, not going there.” Janet downs her drink all at once, choking slightly. No one’s having fun anymore, except maybe Natasha. Tony ought to stop this, play a good host, but—

“Never have I ever lied in never have I, uh- never,” he announces, swirling his martini. Drunker than he thought he was, he’s watching Natasha, desperate to know, suddenly, that she’d really never cheated on a partner. It doesn’t add up with his conception of her, and something about the possibility endears her to him, makes him feel, again, that he isn’t quite worth her.

Steve’s the only one who drinks, finishing off his coke. Well, Tony could have said that already.

“Noooo,” Janet says, whiny, “no, you strip. That’s the rule.”

“You’ve had too much,” Steve says, wrapping an arm around her waist. Drunk and malleable, she tucks herself against his side, the earlier grudge forgotten.

“Noo,” she says again, with little heat, “I can keep playing.”

“Yeah, but do you _want_ to?” Steve asks, skeptically, gesturing all around them. “C’mon, let’s go home.”

“Don’t put your shirt on, though,” Jan says, as he picks her up bridal style.

“We’re gonna head out,” Steve says, waving awkwardly with the hand under Jan’s knees, “thanks for having us, Tony.”

“Bye, Tony,” Jan echoes, and then they’re gone.

“Shame,” Natasha says, finishing Tony’s martini, “I thought this might end quite a bit differently.”

Tony blinks at her, a little sleepy. It occurs to him he’s barely said anything in the latter half of the night, too caught up in his own thought. Had he even said goodbye?

“I don’t think even a licensed psychiatrist could navigate the emotional ramifications of that foursome, darling,” he says, sliding down on the couch to get his head into her lap.

“Well, there’s a reason everyone fucks at the Olympics,” Natasha points out, “get so many young, _fit_ people into a room…”

The way she says _fit_ rankles him slightly, makes him feel like he doesn’t quite measure up. Sure enough, he’d had trouble last night, dulled by the new painkillers he’s on, the ones mixing so poorly with alcohol, and she’s a woman who clearly needs to get some regularly, but…

“Don’t look so skeptical.” she says, “Just think about it, you’d love it.”

Jan has left one of her flat shoes under his couch, and Steve had never bothered to pick his shirt up off the footrest. He lets himself imagine a world where the playful stripping had gone further, perhaps—

The safest place to start, especially after the revelations of the evening, is with Natasha and Janet. They’re both attractive women, and they’d make a pretty picture on top of each other, Natasha’s long red nails tangled in Janet’s short black hair. She’d come out on top, he’s sure, the flavor of bossy in bed that he knows so well, pulling Janet’s mouth down to where she wants it, lipstick trailing on clear porcelain skin.

He and Steve would avoid the conflict of doing each other’s girls, perhaps, and just sit back, shoulder to shoulder, to watch. The electric draw towards Rogers has necessarily faded over time, dulled to a watchful, comfortable sort of interest over the course of their friendship and work life, but imagining him this way is still slightly intoxicating.

Maybe the girls stop, briefly, and Natasha turns to face them, says something like, _well, don’t we deserve a show, too?_ and Janet, more amused by the suggestion than aroused, agrees, _go on boys,_ and then Steve—

It has to be Steve, doesn’t it? Steve, who’d lied during the game that night, Steve, who can’t have possibly ever sucked dick, and yet— and yet, in the comfort of his fantasy, Tony can pretend he’d known the term, that he’d meant it.

So, Steve, in his fantasy, blushes that same faint red, shakes his head. “I’m not going to—“ he says, but all of them know he’s absolutely going to, that he’s already halfway on his knees, and then—

“No,” Tony says, with a severity that surprises him, “I don’t think it’d work out.”

Natasha shrugs, worming her thigh out from under his head, and stands. “Suit yourself.”

Tony falls asleep there, on the couch, mourning the loss of warmth and company, dwelling, as always, on the disappointing impermanence of things.

* * *

The next time the four of them gather in same sitting room, sitting on those same yellow couches, the occasion is far more somber.

Someone has leaked the truth about the Hulk. Thor has quit the team. Bruce Banner’s trial is televised, live. Outside the mansion, crowds of protestors wave signs calling for his head.

Tony doesn’t even know if the Hulk _can_ die, but that’s not a thought that brings him any joy right now.

Steve is trying to keep himself from getting angry, and it’s not working. Janet looks on the verge of tears, quiet and serious. Tony, who hasn’t bothered to change out of his pajamas, is on his third martini. The separation the alcohol forces between him and the rest of reality feels like the only way to survive right now, the only to keep functioning.

Only Natasha remains as matter of fact as always, barely affected by the news. When Steve switches the channel, landing incidentally on Thor’s Sixty Minutes interview, she snorts, high and girlish, and throws her head back.

“Can you believe I actually planned to seduce him when I first joined the team?” she asks, “God, look at him.”

Something about this rankles Tony, just a little. Natasha had never known Banner particularly well, of course. Natasha, her reputation already shrouded in shadow, has less invested in the team’s PR, the way people see the Ultimates. He’s never seen Natasha cry, has never seen her particularly upset over the loss of human life on missions. It’s never bothered him; she’s action girl, grizzled and used to combat, hidden behind the tough exterior.

He likes that about her. He likes the lack of sensitivity, the lack of weakness, the way she takes charge of situations. He thinks it’s cute when she teases him over his emotions. He likes that she just lets him take care of her, has no issues using his money. He’d never liked to soothe, or reassure, to have to be the strong one.

He’s going to marry her, and he’s going to be happy. In the best case scenario, he has four years left to blow, and she’s easy to have fun with. She’s all he could ask for, all he could want.

And yet—

And yet, as watching Steve take Janet’s hand in both of his, pressing his lips briefly to her fingers, he feels strangely empty, strangely unsatisfied.

* * *

They ask Tony to kill Bruce Banner.

He does.

* * *

Natasha doesn’t accompany him to the funeral. Watching Steve and Jan leave hand in hand, Tony has to fight an overwhelming sense of loneliness that threatens to overtake the background hum of guilt.

When he gets home, his dark suit still wet from the slushy late fall rain, she’s already waiting for him in the kitchen, an amber drink he can’t identify balanced between her fingers.

She sets it down and steps forward towards him. For a moment, he thinks she’s going to hug him, but instead she gets on her tiptoes and kisses him hard on the lips, pushing him backwards into the wall.

They have the best sex of their relationship that night, with her on top of him, his wrists bound to the headboard. She forces him to stay in the moment, her nails digging hard into his skin. It’s not callousness, he tells himself; this is calculated. She cares, and this is how she shows it, her way of taking care of him.

What they have is good. What they have is better than the sappy, quiet sort of support their teammates go for. What they have is their style, rough and fast and sexual, and—

Well, Tony isn’t the kind of guy to want a cuddle afterwards. He can’t allow himself to be.

* * *

He asks her to marry him. She says yes.

He wonders if Steve and Janet will follow them, once her divorce is settled. Sure, he can see the fissures in their relationship from a mile away, the subtle ways that they rub each other wrong, but that’s never stopped anyone from getting married before.

Tony and Nat won’t have kids. They’re never talked about it, but it’s a given, considering how little time Tony has left. He’d make an awful father, and she an even worse mother — Hawkeye’s natural ability with kids doesn’t extend to his work partner.

Maybe Steve and Janet will. A strange jealousy swirls in Tony’s gut at the thought. It must be, he decides, for the imagined normalcy of their married lives, the easy apple pie marriage he’s sure they’re headed towards. It’s not him. It’s never been him. He’s never wanted it, and he knows Steve must have, knows he’d been engaged once before to a woman who’d gone to have four children in a little house in the suburbs.

He doesn’t know what there is to be jealous about, and yet he feels it keenly, soaking into the very core of his being.

“We should have Steve and Jan over,” he tells Natasha, one day after he proposes. She’s sitting across from him on the couch, her feet on his lap.

“Well, I’ll ask her to help me pick out the dress,” she replies, without looking from the text message she’s writing. “We can ask them after.”

He beams at her, suddenly reminded of the fact that they’re getting married. He’s getting married. He’s found someone who loves him enough to want to spend the rest of his life with him, and—

And isn’t that everything he could have wanted?

* * *

There’s a wolf in the fold.

None of them believe Thor about it until it’s too late and Hawkeye’s family lays slaughtered in their warehouse, the man himself missing. For the first time in their year-long relationship, Tony sees Natasha cry.

It doesn’t last long. She doesn’t sob, or even really ruin her makeup — if anything, she looks prettier with her cheeks a little flushed, her lips redder and poutier.

“Darling,” Tony says, touched and a little out of his element. She lets him draw her into his arms, buries her face in his neck.

“I’d just bought a gift for Callum’s seventh,” she says, “it was a big, cuddly lion. I was going to ask you to have Jarvis wrap it.”

Tony had seen the thing, sitting at the bottom of their closet for the past couple weeks. He leans down and kisses the top of her head. “We can bring it to the memorial,” he suggests, knowing full well this will fix nothing.

She nods and sets her jaw, tamping down on whatever she’s feeling. In a moment, all emotion is gone from her face, even her eyes. The sudden neutrality almost unnerves Tony.

“It was all for a good cause, wasn’t it?” She asks him, “In the end, it’ll be worth it.”

He blinks at her, suddenly taken aback. “This a ‘God’s plan’ sort of sentiment, or—?”

He’d never known her to be religious.

“No, I meant—“ she sighs, frustrated. Perhaps he shouldn’t have pushed. “He knew what he was getting into. We— well, they wouldn’t have been in the line of fire in an ideal world, but— this was all because of us, right? And we’re doing the right thing.”

It must be a Russian sort of practicality. Or, perhaps, she’s looking for justifications, even for something she’s innocent in.

“I wouldn’t blame yourself,” Tony says, gently, “I wouldn’t blame us.”

* * *

The next morning, Natasha watches, still in her lingerie — she actually sleeps in her lingerie, unlike any other girl he’s known, the lacy black push-up bra on more often than it’s off— and pulls him down when he tries to rise.

“Let’s duck this meeting with Fury and the guys,” she says, her voice near-whiny, “I’m feeling awful. Can we just—“

Her hands on his crotch, soft through the velvet of his pajamas, make her meaning clear.

“— snuggle up?”

It’s a love language they both speak better than any other. He kisses her neck, her breasts, spending time around her perfectly formed pink nipples, runs his hands along the curve of her back.Sometimes, like this, he feels like there’s nothing in the world except him and her body.

A loud clanging, huge and metallic, sounds outside the window, jolting Tony straight back into reality. She’s on top of him, so he pushes himself up on his elbows to try to look out the window, adrenaline flooding into his veins. “What the hell was that?”

Natasha isn’t fussed. She surges down again, tries to kiss him. “Shh,” she says, “just relax.”

Later, he’ll wonder what she’d wanted, what she would have done if he’d listened to her. Sometimes, he flatters himself, imagines that she’d wanted him, one last time, some kind of farewell present.

Now, though, he’s confused, alarmed.

“What are you talking about?” He asks, “It sounds like world war three is going on out there. We need to—“

She surges down and kisses him again, hard. It’s awkward, because he’s not kissing back.

“Nat,” he says, a realization suddenly dawning, “Nat, no. Oh, no.”

He tries to sit up.

She’s stronger than him, a combination of thousands of dollars in biological enhancements and thousands of hours of rigorous training. In a moment, she’s got him on his back, her knee over his neck. He barely catches the motion of her going for the gun in the bedside table before it’s in her hands.

“Oh, yes,” she purrs, still low and sexual.

The door to the bedroom opens. _It’s back up,_ Tony thinks, dumbly, _they’ve found her out. They’re here to help._

And then he realizes that it’s only Jarvis. He needs to play it cool — if Jarvis sees the gun, she’s going to kill him. She’s not taking any risks.

“Master Tony,” he starts, casually, “I’m afraid we didn’t have any ostrich eggs, but I did find a—“

A single shot rings out, piercing the silence.

Jarvis falls to the floor, the tray in his hands. He hadn’t even seen anything. He hadn’t said anything. It’s nothing but cruelty at this point, an old grudge taken to its logical extreme.

Tony stares down, transfixed by the place in Jarvis’s head where his brains are bubbling out. Dark red blood seeps into the cracks between the floorboards, and all Tony can think of are the chances of surviving this sort of injury. He’s had to learn a lot about brains, considering his own condition. He’s read stories about miraculous recoveries, people surviving whole poles being driven through their skulls. He also knows they’re called miracles for a reason.

The blood loss will kill him within minutes if the brain injury hasn’t already. He’s not breathing. Tony has to be realistic.

“Get dressed,” Natasha says.

Tony picks his shirt up and pulls it over his head, inside-out. “Let me call for help. I won’t tell them anything, just let me get him—”

“Pants.”

He pulls his pants on, too. “Just let me get him a doctor, Natasha. There’s a chance — people have survived worse, as long as it didn’t go—”

“Would you stop blabbering on about Jarvis? He’d walked into the wrong place at the wrong time, and now he’s dead,” Natasha says, her voice cold without being cruel, “that’s all there is to it.”

“I can’t believe this.” Tony says, “I can’t believe you’d do this to us.”

It’s true. He can’t believe it. Even now, he can’t bring himself to fight back, to hurt her.

She’s keeping him alive for a reason. Maybe if he can talk to her, get her to see sense — if he can tap into the part of her that must love him, still, because she hasn’t gone so far as to kill him.

“How much did they pay you?” He asks.

“Almost nothing,” she replies, shrugging, “not as much as you’re going to, anyhow.”

His heart drops into his stomach, lead heavy. “Is that why I’m still alive?”

“No,” she says, cruel now, “it’s because I find cancer-ridden drunks who smells of chemotherapy drugs attractive. Get a move on, Stark. I don’t have all day.”

He’s really going to have to do this. There’s no other way.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, and he activates the nanites in her brain and bloodstream, the ones he’d injected to give her control of his suits.

Her gun clatters to the floor, metal on tile.

* * *

They win the fight against the Liberators. Feeling nothing but numb, Tony breaks out the champagne.

Barton kills Natasha.

He’d nearly killed himself, he knows. The brain damage from the nanites could easily have been fatal, and he’d known it as he’d done it. There’s a perverse sort of relief that, in the end, it hadn’t been him.

Tony could be rid of her now, could try to move on, to tell himself none of it had really ever mattered to him, either. A year together. An engagement.

He’d planned to spend what little time he had left with her.

Trained to throw money at his problems, he calls the funeral parlor to arrange a ceremony, buy a gravestone. He doesn’t know what to put on the engraving except her name.

It’s some time before he can throw the funeral itself. He’s waiting for after shakes of the disaster to pass, feeling that it’d be wrong to take up space while good men and women — men and women who’d never betrayed them — still lay unburied.

At first, they won’t surrender the body to him. He hadn’t been her emergency contact. He wonders who had.

It’s a beautiful church, the same one he assumed he’d marry in. Light filters in through the open stained glass windows. Bird sing outside. It’s a bright, sunny day. He’s bought a bouquet of roses, Osiria blooms. The red tips on their white petals make him feel like the flowers had been dipped in blood. 

He doesn’t think this chapel had ever hosted such an empty ceremony. Barton sits front row at the funeral of the woman he’d killed. Fury has taken a seat in the back row, his face set, and Tony wonders why he’s here. Had he, like Tony and Barton, ever cared for her? Is he here to send a final farewell to one of his agents?

Natasha, he remembers, had wanted both of them at their wedding.

Natasha, he remembers, had never planned to marry him.

Natasha, he remembers, had bought a cuddly lion for the birthday of a little boy whose death she’d have a hand in orchestrating.

Are they expecting him to give a speech? What can he say to them? How can he presume to tell Barton, right now, how to feel about what she had been.

He crosses the room, fiddles with the mike. When he glances up, he sees another figure in the doorway, framed in shadow, wide shouldered in a way only Steve Rogers and Thor are. The spiky hair and military posture leave only one possibility.

He doesn’t know what Steve’s doing here.

“This isn’t how I thought I’d be taking Natasha to church,” he says, into the mike. It’s barely a joke. No one laughs. “And I guess that’s on her. But— thought we could get some closure. Do this the right way.”

He sets the roses down on the microphone stand, suddenly unwilling to approach the casket at all, feeling like something may rise out of it. Barton stands at the same time he leaves the stage, and Tony doesn’t turn to go and see what he’s going to do. For all he knows, for all he’s going to do about it, the man’s here to piss on her still-empty grave.

He can’t deny him the chance.

Steve’s still standing there, leaning against the doorway. When Tony passes him, he follows, his hands in his pockets.

He doesn’t look great, either. The dress uniform he wears is scuffed, grey dust on olive green fabric. As always, he’d been fairly torn up in the battle. Most of his cuts have healed, but the deepest one, a long gash on his cheek, peeks out from under bright blue stitches.

“I didn’t think you and her liked each other very much,” Tony says.

“I didn’t come here for her,” Steve replies. Tony fights the urge to laugh.

“I didn’t think you and I liked each other very much,” he replies, meaner than he’d intended. Steve watches him for a long moment, his expression completely unreadable. He’d spat out a tooth in the final fight, and Tony can see him running his tongue over the hole in his gum.

“Look,” Steve says, throwing his hands up, a little defensive, working towards angry, “if you don’t want me here, I’ll go.”

Here’s Tony’s problem: he’s an extrovert. When given the choice between going home alone and not, he’s always going to choose the former.

“No,” he says, “didn’t mean anything by it, old boy. Stay.”

Steve exhales, accepting that, and shoves his hands into the pockets of his ratty suit.

“That looks dirty,” Tony says, mostly just to fill the silence.

“Lot of funerals lately. Haven’t gotten it cleaned.”

Of course, Tony thinks, as the two of them turn to walk back towards the parking lot, of course he’s got just the one.

“Come home with me,” he says, the exact same request he’d had a year earlier. “Call Jan if you want to. I could use a drinking buddy.”

“I don’t know,” Steve says, his pinched expression showing exactly how carefully he’s choosing his words, “where we are with Jan.”

Tony’s driver waits for him in the little black sports car in the corner of the lot. Tony cracks open the back door and takes Steve by the elbow, pushing him inside. As knows to expect, now, Steve just rolls with it, slides inside and buckles his seatbelt.

He doesn’t know why he’s allowed to do this.

“What happened with Jan?” He asks.

Steve frowns down at his hands. His left palm still sports a long, deep slash mark, the kind of defensive wound one ends up with after trying to catch knives with bare hands. Bright blue stitches outline the cut, the color insultingly cheery.

“She—“ he starts, and then immediately cuts himself off, “you don’t want to hear this. You’ve got bigger problems.”

“All of my problems are dead and gone, I’m afraid,” Tony says, shrugging, and, when Steve still doesn’t budge, he prods. “Go on, then. Let me live vicariously through your relationship with someone unlikely to try to kill you.”

Steve pulls lightly at the stitches on his palm, working his short, dirty nails under the bright shiny nylon. “I don’t know if we’re still together. She had an affair.”

“Oh.” Tony says, mildly. He supposes he shouldn’t be surprised; she’d gone from cheating with Steve to cheating on Steve, and that’s natural enough, isn’t it?

“With Hank,” Steve adds miserably. He’s pulling on the stitches hard enough now that Tony thinks they might give. “Who damn near killed her. Hit her in the face hard enough to snap her palate clean in half. I don’t understand how—“

Tony can see his fingers go white where he’s gripping the sutures, and he can’t take it; he reaches over and takes Steve by the hand, physically pulling it away from the wound.

Steve tenses, totally sidetracked, and turns to give Tony a confused look. “What?”

“Don’t pick at that,” Tony says, tapping against the sutures with one of his own fingers. Miraculously, they’ve survived. “I don’t want blood on my carseats. Genuine leather.”

“It's fine,” Steve says, dismissively. He doesn’t move his hand.

Tony, oddly delighted by this, runs his fingernail over the edge of the cut. “Guy with the lightsaber do that?”

“What?”

“The, uh, the glowing red sword,” Tony clarifies, wondering how he’d expected Steve to get that one. He’d never known the guy not to fall asleep in the first five minutes of an action movie.

“Yeah,” Steve says, not looking at Tony, “Abdul.”

“Abdul?”

“Skinny kid. Wanted to do what was right for his country. Got the serum.”

“Ah,” Tony says, watching his profile, “that hit some button? There, but for the grace of God…?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says, “I _did_ go there. I did all the same things he did, really.”

“You didn’t join a terrorist organization,” Tony points out, an edge of amusement to his voice.

Steve, finally, pulls his hand back.

“No,” he says, “I guess not.”

* * *

When Tony had brought Steve home after the Chitauri invasion, that first time, it was a quiet affair. Tony sat on the couch, drinking champagne straight out of the bottle. Steve pus his feet up on Tony’s coffee table and turned on the TV, swapping channels unlike he found whatever shitty medical soap he’d been into.

He had fallen asleep on the couch, and woke stretched out on the couch, his bare feet laying across Cap’s lap. It was strange, he thought, drowsily, that Steve hadn’t woken him, hadn’t pointed it out, hadn’t pushed his feet away and laughed him off.

It was comfortable. Cozy, almost.

It’s what he expects to happen this time.

He leads Steve to the sitting room, the one with the two yellow couches, one of the few parts of the mansion that still feels the same. It’s just the two of them. They sit on opposite ends of the same couch. Steve turns on the TV.

Tony turns back to call for Jarvis to bring him an obituary cocktail, and then remembers just who he is mourning for. He stands and grabs himself a bottle of wine instead, red.

It doesn’t taste great straight out of the bottle, un-aired. He doesn’t mind.

Steve turns on the television. Tony catches his eye and swings his feet onto the couch, his soles pressed against Steve’s warm, firm thighs.

Steve doesn’t stop him.

He’s of the generation, Tony thinks, when men touched each other more freely. This, sitting on the couch with him, isn’t strange to Steve. They’re friends. Coworkers. Brothers in arms. Comrades — this word, now, makes him think of Natasha. It’s not even Russian, associated with the country through nothing but American propaganda, stereotyped Cold War era film, but she had liked it. Used it.

Hell, Tony doesn’t know why every time they touch feels so surprising to him, so electric. He’d certainly never been the kind of guy to shy away from touch.

Steve’s watching the television. Tony nudges him lightly with his big toe, and asks, playing at a casual voice, “What’d you lie about?”

“What?” Steve asks, turning to him.

“A couple weeks ago,” Tony says, and suddenly feels dizzy with how much changed, how quickly things have gone, “When we were all still— still here. You said you lied about something.”

“When?” Steve asks. Tony has the feeling he knows.

“The game,” he reminds him, “Never have I ever. I still have your shirt, by the way.”

“Oh,” Steve says, “It’d be against the spirit of the game to tell you, wouldn’t it?”

“It was against the spirit of the game to lie,” Tony points out, “So.”

Steve turns down the volume on the television, turns to face Tony, his elbows braced on the arm of the couch. Tony holds his eye, his heart suddenly beating faster.

“If you guess it, I’ll tell you if you’re right or not,” Steve says. He’s drawing them into the confines of a game, again, that not-quite-real space where things mean less, matter less.

This time, it feels like a game of chicken. Tony chickens.

“You’d stood her up,” he says, fully knowing he’s wrong. “You were just being a dick.”

Steve turns back to the television. His shoulders droop a little. If he didn’t know better, Tony would think he’s disappointed.

“No,” he says, “that wasn’t it.”

The rest of the night proceeds exactly how Tony expects it to.


	3. 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said I was posting every week, but the giddiness of finishing a fic makes me immediately post it literally every time. Hope you enjoy this chapter! It's the one where the sex happens.

Things move forward, as things tend to do. Natasha is buried. Tony hires a clean up crew, finally, to sponge the leftover blood and brain matter out of his bedroom floor and returns to sleeping alone in his silky, luxurious bed, kind of hoping for some kind of ghost activity.

His room remains quiet. The sink doesn’t turn on by itself. The lights don’t flicker. He hears fewer voices than his average.

He is, again, alone.

The team isn’t the same, and not just because they’ve left SHIELD behind. When he’s there, Hawkeye walks around like a lifeless automaton, his eyes downcast, his expression perpetually distant. He takes unnecessary risks in battle, escalating each time they’re out. None of them dare to stop him.

Thor is gone more often, wandering wherever he goes when he’s off-world. He seems a little happier, a little more satisfied, like he’s earned his place in his homeworld pantheon.

To Tony’s surprise, Steve and Jan never get back together. The two of them find a common language on the team quickly enough, both willing to put baggage aside for the greater good, but rarely talk in the quiet moments between missions, don’t look at each other in training.

Now, in those moments, Steve mostly turns to him.

And Tony, realizing he’s unable to define their relationship in any other way, makes it into a game.

They’ve moved away from SHIELD. Tony strikes up a contract to use some of the training rooms, the simulations, but since Nick Fury is one stingy bastard, when it comes down to it, he ends up building most himself. The team grumbles, as they always do, about having to attend training at Tony’s black sites in New Mexico, Montana, or, God forbid, Nevada, but Tony thinks the quality of care only improves.

Right now, four of them — Steve, Janet, and the twins, because Hawkeye is apparently on a SHIELD assignment and Thor hasn’t been reachable in a couple weeks — are facing off against robotic enemies Tony had designed and commissioned a couple weeks ago. For the cheek of it, he’d given them similar faces to the ones Pym had installed on his robots, but the bodies range from humanoid to insect-like, many jointed with long, spiky pincers.

Pietro is showing off, batting one of the robots around. Wanda, looking bored, doesn’t seem to have gotten off her phone.

Janet has shrunken down and disappeared one of the robots and is struggling with the mechanisms Tony has constructed inside, causing the thing to careen back and forth unpredictably. This, naturally enough, leaves Steve and Tony to try going hand-to-hand with the things.

“I’ll bet you,” Tony says, “I’ll take down more than you can.”

Steve frowns, considering, “The little centipede things count for half, they’re easy. Usual terms?”

“Yeah, you can owe me.”

Tony cheats; he’d built the robots, and he knows how they come undone, the exact weak points to hit. He takes out four of them to Steve’s two, and then they break for lunch.

“So,” Steve says, sounding like he’s trying to be bummed about it, “what do I owe you?”

Familiar plans spin out in Tony’s mind — the three piece suits, the ballroom, the finger foods Steve will certainly struggle with— and he smiles.

“I need a date,” he says, “some charity event or something. Booked for two.”

“Oh,” Steve says, and then shrugs, like it’s no big deal, “you’ll send me the time and dress code, then.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, “Yeah, sure.”

 _Date_ probably meant something more vague back in Steve’s day, Tony thinks. He’d probably missed Tony’s attempt to provoke entirely. It’s just as well, really; not one of his best. Still, he can’t quite get the interaction out of his head as he trudges upstairs to shower, — privately, thank you very much, a big improvement from SHIELD’s facilities— can’t stop himself from imagining a world of horrible misunderstandings in which he had, somehow, really meant “date.”

In this world, he somehow imagines a possibility of something between himself and Steve. It’s probably not serious — it’d be ridiculous to expect the two of them to be able to come up with something stable, not to mention, that, for reasons Tony can’t quite explain, imagining himself with a man immediately comes with the expectation that it can’t be serious, can’t be the same kind of thing he’d always thought he’d have with a wife — but perhaps he’s invested in it anyhow. Maybe, in this hypothetical world, he’s excited right now, a little giddy with joy. Maybe this matters to him. Maybe he thinks Steve had agreed because Steve returns his interest, and he’s planning out the details. Steve, who is as straight as anyone comes and could not have thought about it this way, doesn’t know, but hypothetical-Tony is probably imagining taking him home and sleeping with him.

This has to be the reason hypothetical-Tony cares about this, after all. Hypothetical-Tony, despite making a dumb mistake, is still Tony; he hasn’t caught feelings.

He texts Steve the time and dress code, harasses him into surrendering his suit jacket to fitted properly, and picks him up a week later in the limo he owns just to be annoying. It’s fun, Tony realizes — he’d having fun arranging this, having fun mildly inconveniencing Steve, having fun imagining the kind of picture they’ll make together.

By now, the fact that Cap likes him is old news. The paparazzi have caught them together — sometimes with girlfriends, sometimes without — at various diners, sporting events (what’s Tony supposed to do, here, when the guy likes baseball so much), and the like. People ask him all the time to finagle Cap into product sponsorships or charity events or photo ops, and Tony doesn’t, because he’d rather Cap keep liking him.

It’s not going to be the same, really, parading him around now. This isn’t about social status — it’s entirely for Tony’s benefit.

In the dim light of the car, Steve looks good. The military suit, cinched at the waist now in a way he’d never allowed before, flatters his silhouette even sitting. He smells nice, too, simple, clean aftershave the taint tang of body wash. He must have just showered. It makes Tony want to call the night off and just—

Just what? There’s no endgame here. He’s not trying to get anything from Steve. He’s certainly not getting laid. If he calls this off, he loses Steve.

“So,” Steve says, casually, completely oblivious to Tony’s confused inner monologue. “You never said what the charity event is for.”

“Uh, it’s either orphans or medical research,” Tony guessed. “Unless it’s the environment, but those guys don’t tend to love me, so.”

“Great,” Steve says, drily, “I’ll make sure to use that as a topic of conversation.”

“Oh, you’re there to look pretty,” Tony quips back, “Don’t talk.”

Steve rolls his eyes, his expression settled into a distant sort of fondness, and obediently keeps his trap shut the rest of the way.

The party is familiar, a distant echo of the one where, more than a year ago, Tony had needled Cap and fussed over his gloves. The domed ceiling is less grand, perhaps, the view less perfect, the guests a couple links lower on the food chain, the food a little more standard, less fanciful, and yet the sounds and smells are the same. The trills of fake laugher mingle in the air with expensive-for-its-simplicity cologne, with sharp, want-to-make-an-impression perfume, with the faint clicking of heels and scuffs of dress shoes.

Steve seems better at ease here. His shoulders are a degree lower, the muscles of his back — the way he’s holding his arms— neither entirely relaxed nor battle-ready. His eyes stop briefly on the exits and then move forward, unfettered, back around the room. He smiles at people, the natural kind of smile that means he’s at least socially okay with meeting them. When they separate, briefly, he doesn’t spend all of his time awkwardly milling by the refreshments.

It could be, Tony thinks, just the fact that he’s in his suit and not his uniform, that he blends in with the crowd relatively well. He’s still awkward, sure, unaccustomed to the kind of conversation made here; automatically, Tony finds himself bailing the guy out when things seem to be getting out of hand for him.

Whenever they seem to separate, and he turns to look for Steve, Steve is inevitably close by, ready to catch his eye. It’s not until the end of the night that Tony takes it as anything but a willingness to leave at any time.

He’s chatting a tall blonde in a low cut sparkly red dress. By now, he’s been drinking slowly for hours, and the level, calm warmth of it, the feeling he chases, always, when he reaches for the glass, is upon him.

Their flirtation is so by the numbers he could do it in his sleep, but he likes her figure, likes her face, likes the D cups the faint hint of muscle in her arms, just enough to add an athletic sort of firmness to her figure. He thinks they could have a good time together.

And then he catches Steve staring, his anxiety clearly visible through his awful, awful poker face. He must know Tony won’t dump him here alone, right? If nothing else, Tony’s driver will certainly be ready to take him home. He’s not heartless, over here.

No, Tony thinks, this isn’t about that. Steve’s willing to leave at any time, but he wants to leave with Tony.

Part of his wants to laugh at that, laugh at the idea of himself — well known for being anything but responsible— as Steve’s liferaft, as the element which has been putting the guy at ease. Another part of him feels a strange, possessive satisfaction.

“Well,” he tells the girl, “I’m unfortunately dreadfully busy tonight. Can I get your number?”

She gives it to him, though he’s sure she thinks the request is some kind of confirmation he’s stepping out on someone. Instead of punching it into his phone, she leans over and writes it on the inside of his wrist, one of her curls brushing against his lips and wafting over a familiar smell of coconut almond conditioner, the same one Natasha had used.

He doesn’t think he’ll be calling her.

Steve livens up immediately when Tony makes his way over, a sort of relief written into his features. He doesn’t smile, not exactly. Tony, tipsy and warm, smiles back.

“C’mon,” he says, taking hold of Steve’s arm, “we’re headed out, you’re coming to my place.”

“Is your pretty friend coming, too?” Steve asks, gesturing back at the woman Tony was talking to.

For a moment, something like jealousy curdles in the pit of Tony’s stomach, but he shrugs it off and lies easily. “No, no, I’m afraid she’s otherwise engaged. Another night, I’m sure.”

“No women,” Steve’s voice is somewhere between a question and a statement, “it’s just us coming back.”

“Uh, yeah,” Tony says, “nothing new there.”

They’d come back together, just the two of them, after the battle with the Chitauri, and then after they had taken down the Liberators.

“I suppose,” Steve says slowly, catching the tail end of Tony’s thought, “this is a victory of a kind.”

“Don’t be weird,” Tony tells him, stopping by the bar near the entrance to help himself to a Bloody Mary to go. “Drinks?”

“I’m fine.”

It’s dark outside, and suddenly much colder than Tony remembers. As the cross the road to get into Tony’s valeted limo, the icy chill seems to pierce right through his blazer and under his skin. Even the car, almost stuffy with canned heat, can’t seem to cure him of the cold. He’s shivering.

The trick to getting away with things, Tony knows, is to just do them. Hesitation, any trace that you _know_ you’re breaking a rule — that’s what dooms you. You can’t let on.

And so, as they sit down in the backseat of the car, the two middle seats between them, Tony casually toes off his dress shoes and worms his cold feet under Steve’s big warm thighs.

Steve turns to look at him. The eye contact they make goes on too long, Steve’s pupils so wide his blue eyes look almost black.

It has to be the dark.

“I think I know,” Tony says, barely conscious of the words coming out of his mouth, “what you lied about.”

It has to be the drink.

“Oh,” Steve says, sounding the kind of neutral he almost never sounds, his voice unreadable.

Is that hope? Confusion? Amusement? What else could it be?

“Is there a reason,” Steve continues, picking his out carefully, clunkily, as though they’re particularly heavy objects, “that you care so much to know?”

Tony’s not stupid.

“I’m straight,” he says, in the kind of voice oozes _convince me._

“You wouldn’t be the one doing it,” Steve points out pragmatically, with a take-it-or-leave-it kind of shrug. His voice is gruff with the kind of masculinity he puts on for the women.

“Close the partition,” says Tony, gesturing to the partition between them and the driver, who’s probably heard everything even from the other side of the limo and will need to be paid off. “Tell him to turn on some music, too, while you’re up there.”

Wordlessly, Steve obeys the instructions.

Tony recognizes the song that comes in the first few notes. Leonard Cohen’s deep, simmering voice joins him before Steve does. _They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom—_

Steve sits back down on edge of the bench-like leather seat, tense in anticipation of movement. There’s more space here than most cars would have, but they’re both tall men. If they do this, this’ll be a little awkward.

As though there’s an _if._

“I’m gonna be in charge, here,” Tony says, “I’m not playing the virgin.”

“Alright,” Steve says, plainly. He doesn’t look at all put out by this request.

Tony puts a hand on his side to urge him downwards, onto his knees. When Steve reaches for his fly, though, some stab of fear has Tony catching him by the wrist.

“No,” he says, “I’m in charge, remember?”

Steve stares up at him, one eyebrow raised. He’s receptive, in an amused kind of way. He’s also huge — his shoulders alone nearly fill the space between seats, the outline of his back visible even through his blazer. Three hundred and fifty pounds of superhuman muscle, and he’s on his knees in Tony’s limo, waiting patiently to be allowed to suck Tony’s dick.

The thought is almost impossibly arousing.

“Take off your tie and blazer,” Tony says. Steve doesn’t question it, shedding both. He’s neat, even now; he folds both and sets them gently on the seat he’d vacated.

 _I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons,_ Cohen croons. He sounds closer to the mic than he normally does, somehow more immediate. Tony picks up Steve’s silk tie and wraps it around his wrists, binding them together loosely, parts his legs and steps on the end of the tie.

This is playacting as much as all of this is, and yet Tony is drunk, suddenly, on the power rush of it as much as on the Bloody Mary.

He undoes his own fly, surprised surprised at how hard he is already. Steve’s watching silently, his eyes intense, eager, near-black. It’s not the darkness.

“Well,” Tony says, “What are you waiting for?”

Steve tips forward on his knees, steadying himself with outstretched fingers on the limo’s carpeted floor, and closes his lips on the head of Tony’s dick. The sensation is sharp and startling enough to be near-ticklish, especially when Steve licks up at the slit.

Tony reaches up to tangle a hand in the soft hair at the back of Steve’s neck, almost too short to grab, and urges him forward.

Obediently, Steve follows. As the head of his cock hits the back of Steve’s throat, Tony feels him suppress a gag reaction and press forward, further and further. He remembers training, suddenly, the way Steve only needs to be shown once before he can perfectly recreate a move, a pose. Where had he learned this? Army barracks, sneaking around with other soldiers? Brooklyn, or Manhattan, or Christ, Tony should know this, where the the hell he was from, before the war?

“Shit,” Tony breathes out. Steve has taken him all the way down, his nose pressed to Tony’s skin, buried in thick, dark hair. He’s hollowed out his cheeks, sucking the best he can. “You’ve got a second to back off here, or else I’m gonna fuck your mouth.”

Steve hums in his response, slightly choked but almost amused, a vague, self-satisfied kind of permission.

When Tony brings his free hand up to rest on the side of his jaw, Steve arches into the touch, dragging a fine little line of drool behind his lips as he moves.

It’s not the best angle; even when he braces himself against the back of the seat with his elbow, Tony doesn’t have the leverage he needs to fuck down as much as he wants, the space. He gets by, accompanying rhythmic twitches of his hips with tugs at Steve’s hair.

Steve’s a dear, or perhaps Steve just believes in doing things right. He follows direction perfectly, going just where he’s pulled, his tongue working in tandem with Tony. He doesn’t give any indication he’d like to come up for breath. Super soldier stamina.

Tony feels orgasm coming on so suddenly he near misses the time to pull back, and comes in spurts over Steve’s face, fine white lines clinging to his lips, his stubble, his cheeks, his eyelashes. Steve’s a gorgeous mess, his chin covered in shiny, bubbling drool, his eyes a little bloodshot, dark.

For a moment, every sensation is too much. His shirt collar, starched, is pressing against his neck. He can still feel vodka and tomato juice, the taste warped unpleasantly by the time, on his tongue. The crick in his back will be a full blown ache by tomorrow. His head hurts.

His head always hurts.

And then, just like that, second wave of _something_ washes over him, and the overexposed sensation fades, the aches dull. Tony feels better, he thinks, than before.

 _Well, it’s Father’s Day,_ Cohen is singing, inappropriately, _and everybody’s wounded._ It hasn’t been long, if it’s still the same song. Five minutes, at most.

Tony tucks his dick back into his pants, reaches into the inner pocket of his blazer and pulls out his handkerchief. Steve leans his temple against Tony’s knee as Tony wipes down his face, working in quick, business-like strokes.

They don’t talk about it. When they get there, Steve uses Tony’s shower and Tony drinks by himself on the yellow couch, waiting for him. They watch bad TV. The night passes how Tony expects it to, and by the time he wakes, Steve is gone.

* * *

They don’t see each other for about a week. Tony drafts several text messages, ranging in content and intensity from, _Want to catch a movie this weekend?_ to _Friday was a mistake and can never happen again,_ and sends none of them.

Clearly, this isn’t Steve’s first time doing something like that. That wasn’t bicurious behavior back in the car. Captain America has sucked dick, and that’s the world Tony has to live in. Captain America has sucked _his_ dick, and that’s the world Tony has to live in.

Actually, he’s alright with the second one. A little too alright, perhaps.

He had been drunk, but no more than drunk than he was for most of his sexual encounters. He’d been far more plastered during the battle with the Liberators. His inhibitions had been lowered, perhaps. Perhaps he’d been a tad looser than he would have been otherwise. But Steve hadn’t been pushy, and Tony had called the shots. It doesn’t feel like a drunken mistake. It doesn’t feel like Steve’s idea.

What’s the opposite of rolling in your grave, Tony wonders, as he slathers on fre-flight gel and pulls on the shorts of his flight suit. Jarvis must be dancing in his coffin with vindication at this new development — Tony is no longer a one on the Kinsey scale.

He has another training set up. He’d planned this one for weeks, and he’s proud of it— he’s erected models of cliffs all over the facility, connected only by rickety bridges and vines. Underneath, he’s had cushions and nets hung, ready to catch any falling team member. They’ll be attacked by the same training robots.

The whole team is here, this time, and already bickering over the ground rules — how unfairly biased is this towards people who don’t have a way to fly, shouldn’t Tony agree to switch off his suit, shouldn’t Janet have to agree to not use her wings — and Tony couldn’t help, now, catching Steve’s level gaze.

The guy doesn’t look particularly worried. This, Tony thinks, must not be a new kind of arrangement to him. He probably had needs, in the army. He’d probably slept with men behind Jan’s back. Hell, maybe he was sleeping with other people right now, and Tony wouldn’t know it.

It’s that thought, frustratingly bitter, that causes him to speak up.

“I bet you’ll fall,” he says, casually bumping his gauntlet against Steve’s shoulder.

Steve sizes up the gym, pretending to be considering it. “Usual odds?”

“Sure.”

There’s a while where he thinks he’s going to lose. Though Steve gets bumped off the edge of the foam cliffs several times, the combination of Alps-related mountain climbing experience and frankly insane upper core strength prevent him, each time, from falling further.

They clear the “invasion” in twenty minutes flat and regroup, standing around to discuss tactics and laugh at Quicksilver for the four times he’d ended up in the nets, unused to the landscape. It’s a shame that all of them miss the little camouflaged centipede bot that crawls out from out of the rocks. It’s a shame that it happens to strike, neatly, right at Steve’s ankle, knocking him down over edge. He’d taken by surprise. He doesn’t start trying to catch himself until it’s too late, and flops, uselessly, into the safety net.

Tony must have programmed that thing wrong. What a stinking shame.

He zoomed down to retrieve the guy himself, throwing him casually over a metal shoulder.

“Did that count?” Steve asked him, as the two of them landed on the protruding foam cliff where the rest of the team had already started, mostly, to disperse. “It wasn’t in training.”

“That wasn’t part of the bet, Cap,” Tony shrugs, smug. “We said, if you fall.”

Steve throws him a look that indicates, clearly, that he recognizes the unfair play, knows exactly what Tony had done. He’d have to be stupid not to, and Steve is anything but stupid.

“What do you want?” He asks. For a moment, Tony’s heart is in his throat, some strange, paralyzing anxiety seizing his every muscle. What _does_ he want? Why is he doing this?

And then, slightly sheepish, Steve clarifies, “For the bet.”

“Oh,” Tony says, “I’ll text you the time and place.”

And then he goes home, lays down alone in his luxurious bed, stares at the ceiling, and tortures himself with it.

Here’s the issue: Tony knows addiction. He knows he’s been craving a hit of this, whatever power Steve is allowing him to hold, here, since the beginning of their relationship. And now that he’s gotten to taste it — as brief and messy and drunken and strange as it had been — found it to be precisely, wholly what he’d imagined—

Well. This could be a problem.

He’s got enough dark secrets as it is. If the paparazzi hear he’s sleeping with Captain America—

Well, but no one has heard, have they?

Steve has presumably been doing this for a while, and it didn’t ever make it out onto the public record, has never been caught by the press. It’s not even in his SHIELD files, and it would be, if they knew. Tony knows Fury likes to keep blackmail on everyone he interacts with, and he’s hacked into that repository several times, paranoid to know what the man had found on him.

He knows he’s trying to reason himself into this. This is how it always is when he’s trying to drink less — the little rationalizations don’t matter as much as the goal.

 _I’m dying anyways,_ he thinks now, the same way he thinks when he’s talking himself into a third drink, a fourth, a fifth. _What the fuck does it matter if I have some fun? Why do I care?_

His new butler — the one whose name he still doesn’t remember, ten years older than him with a chubby baby face and crew cut hair — is overeager to please. He fetches Tony cocktail after cocktail, and Tony’s thoughts swirl, more and more disoriented, anxious in new and unexpected ways, as the evening fades into night.

 _Not the kind of man I’d always thought I was,_ he thinks, followed, ridiculously, drunkenly, by, _what does it matter — flesh cells, our bodies, keeping in—_

“Gorgeous souls, or some shit,” he slurs, accepting another glass from the butler, “what does anyone really care what the dangly bits are shaped like, old boy?”

The butler stares at him. Used to Jarvis, Tony expects, hopes, to be absolutely eviscerated by whatever is about to come out of the man’s mouth, but he just nods and retreats to safety outside of Tony’s room.

At some point during the night, he calls the blonde woman from the party. To his surprise, despite the fact that he clearly sounds drunk, despite the fact that he’s forgotten her name, despite the fact that it’s been over a week since they’d last spoken, she agrees to meet. He sends a car for her.He’s already forgotten her name for the second time by the time the butler rings to let him know she’s arrived, but that’s not the important part.

He could sleep with a beautiful woman in his sleep, he thinks, and then has to stifle a laugh at how that sentence had come out, the awkward repetitions, the sentiment.

One moment they’re talking and the next moment she’s undressed, a blur of skin on skin. He’s kissing her, and then she’s kissing him, and then he thinks he’s sexy biting lightly at her nipple, but she says, “ow, that hurts,” he says, “shit, darling, ’m sorry,” and she’s tense, under his fingers, and he’s drunker than he thought he was, and he’d thought he was drunk, even, and she says, “maybe just lay back and let me try to take care of things?” like she’s trying to be polite, and then he throws up and she wipes it off with the silk sheet and props him up on his side and leaves and he—

And then he stares at his wardrobe instead of the ceiling for a while, feeling like shit, craving something — alcohol, maybe, though he can’t stomach the idea of trying to get more down, not now— and he doesn’t even know what he’s thinking when he pulls out his phone and calls Steve.

They rarely call each other, and when they do, it’s always Steve calling — Tony is a texter. Now, though, his fingers feel thick as sausages and perhaps a little less graceful, and he doesn’t want to make a fool of himself trying to type a message out.

Ha.

Steve picks up on the fourth ring.

“I tried to pick up the landline,” Steve informs him.

Tony is silent. Suddenly, he’s at a complete loss what to say.

“I don’t have a landline,” Steve continues, after a beat. “I’ve never had one here. I’ve been here a year and I still try to find the goddamn thing.”

Another beat passes between them. Steve, finally, seems to have caught on to the fact that this isn’t normal. He’d really wanted to say the phone thing, Tony guesses.

“You okay?” He asks.

“Yeah,” Tony says, and then, “no. Yeah, no, I’m. Listen to me.”

“You’re drunk.”

“You’re Sherlock—“ Tony hiccups, which, for some reason, makes him sneeze. “— fucking Holmes, over here. Listen, the time’s now and the place is here.”

“What?”

“I told you I’d say the time and place,” Tony’s annoyed Steve isn’t keeping up with his train of thought. What’s not to get? “‘Cos you owe me.”

Over the line, Tony can hear a light tapping, a rustle of clothes. “Are you at home?”

“Yeah. She left, so.”

“OK,” Steve says, and hangs up.

Tony’s not sure how long it is until he gets there. He feels like his brain is stationed just outside his body, over his forehead, and his body is a heavy, slow thing, holding him down. His bones ache, and he feels his skull, heavy and round, more than any other part of him. He’s noticing specks of dust on the handles of his dresser.

He smells Steve’s aftershave before he’s registered that Steve’s arrived. It’s simple, clean. Soapy, almost. He sees Steve’s hand and Steve is wearing a blue pattered shirt with white buttons.

“I’m awake,” he says, before Steve can ask.

“Do you want to put clothes on, or.” Steve’s statement is flat, uncertain, anything but sexual. Tony’s realized only now that he’s undressed.

Oh, the girl. The sex. His underwear’s still on.

“Hand me the robe,” Tony says. “It’s on the chair.”

Steve picks it up and holds it open for him, and Tony pushes himself and shoves his arms around at random until they’re in the sleeves. It’s almost sweet. Hell, it _is_ sweet.

“You hurled all over the bed,” Steve informs him, gesturing at the offending vomit.

“Yeah, big guy, I know, I was there,” Tony reaches forward and taps Steve on the shoulder. He doesn’t know what he means by this.

“C’mon,” Steve puts a hand on his back and urges him to stand, “Get up.”

Shakily, Tony follows the instruction, wobbling slightly as he stands. He’s not going to walk; he can feel that.

“I’m not gonna get anywhere,” he tells Steve, grabbing his upper arm for balance. “I’m too— my cerebellum is all fucked, that’s what—“

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Little egg,” Tony says, with a yawn, “under your brain.”

“Oh,” Steve says, “I don’t think this is your tumor.”

Before he can correct him, Steve reaches over and picks Tony up. It’s a gentler gesture, lighter, and though Tony’s masculinity refuses to let him label it as “bridal style,” one of Steve’s hands is under his knees and the other on his back.

Apparently a man of tradition, or perhaps just unwilling to stay around the smell of vomit, Steve is headed for the sitting room. He puts Tony down on one of the yellow couches and steps forward to fiddle with the TV.

The only soap opera he finds is in Spanish, which Tony speaks and Steve doesn’t. He seems content to watch anyways.

For a while, they sit.

Tony’s eyes are on the screen, but he can feel the siren call of the heat of Steve’s body. If he were only a few inches closer— he leaned over, would Steve stop him? Would Steve leave?

“What’s she upset about?” Steve asks, ten minutes into the episode. A busty woman with bright blue eyeshadow whose name is either Carmella or Cornelia or something along those lines is wailing the telephone to her friend.

“Her husband shot her lover,” Tony says, and then, in the same breath, “God, I’m so fucking lonely.”

“Oh,” Steve says, mildly, “thanks.”

Tony tips backwards, and backwards, and backwards, until finally he’s laying on the couch, his feet over arm rest, his head on Steve’s thighs. The effort of it makes him dizzy.

Steve doesn’t move. His eyes are still on the television.

“That’s her other lover,” Tony finds himself telling Steve. “The guy in the red shirt.”

Steve frowns at that. “How many does she have?”

“I’unno,” Tony closes his eyes, half-listening to the conversation on the television. “Wish things weren’t so complicated. Don’t want—“

He hiccups, again, loud. He could stop talking here, let Steve assume he was talking about the show.

“— another complication, when I’m fuckin’. I’m fuckin’ dying already. Wish I coulda’jus married her.”

Tony stares up at Steve, wondering if he’s somehow offended him. It feels nebulously wrong, what he just said, but he can’t place exactly how.

Steve reaches down, running his fingers, rough, calloused, over the deep lines in Tony’s forehead, the sharp divot of the bridge of his nose.

“Yeah,” he says, “me too.”

If anything is said after that, Tony doesn’t remember it. When he wakes, Steve is gone and someone has tucked a pillow under his aching head. He tries to sit up, and—

Holy shit, this fucking hangover.

Tony lets the heavy tidal wave of pain drag him back down. Smaller aches, distinct even in the general haze, shoot down his neck, up his temples. The night comes back to him in pieces with an accompanying weary embarrassment.

The girl won’t be anything. Even if she sells her story, which she had seemed a little too sweet to do, “Tony Stark was too drunk to get it up” isn’t a particularly new headline. If anything, it’s exactly a dime a dozen.

It’s Cap, who he is going to have to work with, who he _wants_ to remain friends with, to whom he still feels an irresistible physical attraction, that he’s worried about.

He reaches over and feels along the coffee table, hoping to find painkillers, or whatever, or anything of the sort. Mercifully, Jarvis—

No, the new butler.

The new butler intervenes, offering him his usual morning assortment — coffee, food, colored water with chia seeds floating in it, for health reasons,— and some of the good stuff.

He has the good sense not to speak up until Tony feels human enough to sit up and blink blearily at the room. “Draw the curtains,” he says, trying to quell an annoyance — _Jarvis would know to do this —_ and the man does.

“You have mail, sir,” he says, jokingly, in a too-posh fake British accent, like it will somehow endear him to Tony.

“Just throw the bills on Pepper’s desk,” Tony replies, annoyed.

“No, er. I meant a note.”

“From the young woman last night?”

“From Steve Rogers.” It’s clear he intends the way he says the name to be casual. It doesn’t work.

Tony feels cold dread in the pit of his stomach, anticipation of failure, of rejection. This, he decides, is the feeling he likes least.

“Well,” he says, trying to sound cheery, “let’s get on with it, then. Hand it over.”

The man held out the note, and Tony unfolded it. It was short, one line of Steve’s perfect, condensed handwriting.

_Meet me for breakfast @ Eddie’s. Text time when you’re awake. SR._

This was a break from tradition, unusual for Steve. The diner was familiar; close to base but distinctly simple, American-style, it was the one they went to on the rare occasions Steve or Hawkeye picked the venue.

Steve was the kind of man to face his problems head on, to try to confront what it had been that happened last night, the slip of vulnerability, the awkward, pathetic confessions, the disgusting drunkenness. Steve was the kind of man who’d come with him face to face, and Tony could only imagine what he was going to say.

 _“Listen, this”_ — there would be no need, of course, to clarify what _this_ is— _“this has to end. I don’t think we’re looking for the same thing, Tony. It’ll only be awkward for both of us.”_

Or, perhaps, simpler: _“One of us is going to have to leave the team.”_

Or, even: _“Jesus Christ. Be a man and get your act together.”_

The problem is, of course, that Tony isn’t the kind of man to run from his problems. Putting this off will bring him nothing but unease, nothing but a sense of shirked responsibility.

He fetches his phone and texts Steve. It’s already past breakfast time — eleven thirty-four in the morning — so, deciding lunch is the logical next step, he’s direct, to the point: “Eddie’s, 12:15.” Steve texts back with the thumbs up emoji. Tony’s not sure where, exactly, he’d learned that one.

By the time lunch rolls around, he’s anxious but well-dressed, showered and shaved into the vague shape of a person. He arrives two minutes ahead of schedule and finds Steve already there, sipping on his Coke.

“Afternoon,” Steve says, politely, “How are you feeling?”

“Hangover of epic proportions,” Tony says, smoothly enough, “but they do give me the good stuff for the cancer, so.”

He can feel a faint judgment Steve doesn’t voice. Suddenly, despite this, he realizes he _does_ want to prolong this, to keep Steve here, for the last time, in his reach. There’s some addictive about breathing the same air as the man, and it’s intoxicating to get all to himself.

“So,” Steve starts, but Tony interrupts him.

“Hold on,” he says, “I need to eat. Pickles are a hangover cure. Have you picked—?”

“Yeah, sure,” Steve says gruffly. His arm, muscled and long, immediately attracts the attention of the waitress.

He orders a bacon cheeseburger. Tony, rich enough to be eccentric and planning on tipping well, orders a coffee, two pickles, and a slice of Swiss cheese. It’s all he can imagine keeping down right now.

“Alright,” Steve starts again, once the waitress is gone, “so—“

Again, Tony interrupts him. “Nope. No. Not talking until I eat, Cap, ground rules.”

Steve stares him down, his expression bemused, and then, seemingly deciding not to fight it, takes a long sip of his Coke.

 _You’ve got all the time in the world,_ Tony thinks, _just give me a little. Let me have this._

The food is brought out almost alarmingly quick. Nauseated by the greasy smell of Steve’s burger, Tony breaks his pickles into smaller and smaller chunks on his plate, sending rivulets of salty, greenish water soaking into his cheese.

He feels the need to beat Steve to it, to say something that will exonerate him, but he can’t think of anything.

“Listen,” he says, once Steve’s burger is mostly gone and Steve’s mouth is full, “meds mixed weird with alcohol last night. If you don’t ever bring it up again, I won’t.”

Steve chews. Terrified, Tony realizes he had no idea what he’s thinking, though he doesn’t look impressed.

“Look,” he says, “we don’t ever have to see each other again.” And then, contradicting himself, “We can still work on the same team. Probably no weirder than working with Janet, if you think about it. I didn’t mean any of it, by the way. Alcohol makes you say things. I was just— talking.”

Steve swallows down a lump of burger.

“Tony,” he says, but Tony isn’t listening.

“Listen,” he says, again, “your number was just there. I wasn’t trying to— be weird. I don’t think that just because you—“

Even a rambling, desperate Tony is conscious of when he’s in company. With a glance at the waitress, he lets his voice get quieter, “— I didn’t think what happened in the car meant anything. I’m not being weird.”

Steve plops a French fry into his mouth and washes it down with more Coke.

“So,” he asks, casually, “it’s never occurred to you I might care about you?”

Tony stares at him, struck dumb. “What?”

“Well, idiot, I didn’t come to your spy girlfriend’s funeral in hopes of getting laid, did I?”

Tony reaches over to fuck with the foil wrapper from Steve’s burger. It’s still covered in grease, the lights reflected and warped in its uneven shine.

“Oh.” He says.

“Yep,” Steve says, dragging the word out a little. “That clear?”

Tony can’t help it. He has to keep poking, to find the holes in something too good to be true. “Why’d you ask me to come here?”

Steve speaks casually, pragmatically, like they’re talking about breaching a top secret facility or training exercises for the team, “Well, at some point, we’ll run out of things to bet on. Thought you could come to my place for a change tonight.”

Suddenly, Tony’s giddy. He glances up from the wrapper meets Steve’s eyes, and doesn’t bother concealing his smile.

“Yeah,” he says, “yeah, that sounds fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who's stuck with me & with this fic! I would love to hear your thoughts. If you'd like, you can also find me on tumblr under welcomingdisaster. Sometimes I take writing prompts!


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